[Help-stow] FYI: a couple of stow extensions/alternatives

[Lassi Kortela]

Hello,

Just searched for "stow" in FreeBSD ports 
(<https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=stow>) and it appears 
there are some packages offering extensions and alternatives:

* stowES - Stow enhancement script
* unstow - Script to unstow packages much faster than stow -D
* xstow - Enhanced replacement for GNU stow written in C++

I'm not sure whether you know about these already. Might be worth 
looking into them to see if they can be merged into mainline stow.

That fast "unstow" package is just a simple shell script: 
<https://github.com/knu/stow-utils/blob/master/bin/unstow>. knu is a 
long-time contributor to FreeBSD and a very nice guy in my experience, 
so it would probably be easy to fold this into mainline stow.

StowES: <http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~adam/stowES/> "automates the 
compilation and installation of software packages by calling tar, 
configure, make, and stow with the appropriate arguments" -- may be a 
bit of an extension to stow's core functionality.

XStow: <http://xstow.sourceforge.net/>. It "supports all features of 
Stow with some extensions" but the says last release was in 2014 so that 
claim is probably not true anymore. As expected, the motivation for 
XStow was: "Stow requires Perl. But what's on systems where no Perl is 
available, or not yet installed? I tried compiling Stow with perlcc, but 
it failed. For compiling XStow a C++ compiler and a system with a couple 
of POSIX functions is required. It does not depend on an interpreter. 
Static compilation e.g. for rescue disks is possible."

Hope this is of some help,
Lassi